The Family From, Uh, France Has Settled Into Suburbia

'We will blend in,'' Beldar Conehead reassures his wife, Prymaat, upon realizing that they are stranded here on Earth, 26 light years from their home planet, Remulak.

And blend in they do.

True, their sharp, nasal voices and mechanical waddles tend to make them stand out among the natives hereabouts. And certainly the large, pointed cones that rise high above their foreheads don't exactly bolster their efforts to assimilate with the ''blunt skulls'' of this planet.

But that tolerance and good will for which we earthlings are famous throughout the galaxy offer the Coneheads hope as they settle into suburbia. When anyone questions their origins, they simply say they're ''from France,'' and, usually, that does the trick.

Yes, once again the Coneheads are among us. Those Tang-swilling extraterrestrials who first appeared in sketches on the Saturday Night Live of the mid-1970s have returned in a new feature film.

Once again, Dan Aykroyd is Beldar, paterfamilias of the Conehead clan. Once again, Jane Curtin is Prymaat, his devoted genetomate.

Their teen-age daughter, Connie, who was played by Laraine Newman on TV, is now portrayed by newcomer Michelle Burke. But otherwise, it's business as usual - sometimes, too much as usual.

Coneheads (which opens today) is a lot like the TV sketches that inspired it, only a bit less so. The plot involves the efforts of the Coneheads to stay one step ahead of a pair of zealous immigration agents who want to have them deported.

''The United States of America can no longer solve the employment problems of the rest of the universe,'' one of the agents explains.

Like the SNL sketches, the movie is a satire of '50s (and early '60s) sci-fi films and TV and of '50s suburban values.

As in the sketches, the Coneheads are humorously outrageous, but somehow they don't seem quite as humorously outrageous as they did 20 years ago - although the TV program would never have shown, as the film does, Beldar chewing condoms as if they were bubble gum, not to mention a view of his naked, orifice-free rump. The Coneheads are still fun, but they've moved a step closer to the blunt-skull world of My Favorite Martian.

They have, you might say, blended in.

One problem may be that the movie explains too much about their background, and even includes scenes on their home planet. Watching the TV sketches, part of the fun was trying to fill in what was left out and, ultimately, realizing how ludicrous any attempt to make sense of these creatures must be.

Those sketches were written by Aykroyd and Tom Davis, who also have written the movie - with some help from Bonnie and Terry Turner, co-writers of last year's SNL-inspired Wayne's World film. SNL-honcho and Wayne's World-producer Lorne Michaels is the producer of Coneheads, which was directed in a muscular-slapstick style by Steve Barron of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

With all the SNL/Wayne's World talent on board, it's interesting that Coneheads is a more coherent, much more lavishly staged movie than Wayne's World was. But for all its shortcomings, Wayne's World was fresher, funnier, zanier, more contemporary.

Now, if the Coneheads had met Wayne and Garth . . .

They don't, but other familiar SNL faces pop up, including those of such current SNL players as Chris Farley, David Spade, Phil Hartman, Adam Sandler, Tim Meadows, Kevin Nealon and Julia Sweeney, plus those of SNL-alums Jan Hooks, Garrett Morris and a recast Laraine Newman.

Michael Richards and Jason Alexander, both from Seinfeld, appear, as do Michael McKean and Sinbad. Appropriately enough, the only character to comment rudely about the odd appearance of the Coneheads is a guy played by lout-specialist Tom Arnold.

As always, the two most amusing things about the Coneheads are how different they are from the rest of us - and how much like us they really are. And perhaps as expected, the two best performances in this movie are given by Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin, who have so much assurance in their roles that you'd swear they'd been living on Remulak since the '70s.

Aykroyd, especially, is impressive. He's so fully committed to the role that no matter what Beldar is doing at any given moment - smoking his pipe, playing golf, repairing a lawnmower, having his teeth capped, lecturing his daughter - he's thoroughly, miraculously, in character.

''Maintain low tones with me,'' Beldar cautions when a frustrated Connie raises her voice to her overly protective parental unit.

Cone or no cone, he's Everydad, and his tale is, of course, universal.